Rooftops, Jewels, & Betrayals
by Team Damon
Summary: She doesn't know his name, and he doesn't know she's going to double-cross him within the hour. Based on the scene in TDKR where Selina takes Batman to meet Bane, but with my own twists. A taste of the sort of scene I think we should have been treated to in the real thing. Oneshot, heed the M rating.


**A/N: Alright, this was quite hard to write, because trying to weave something like this into the canon of TDKR is next to impossible, but I did my best lol. It's a complete "what if" idea of mine that popped in my head when I was despairing over the lack of in-depth scenes with Bruce and Selina. All that is changed as far as the movie goes is the scene where Selina meets Batman before taking him to meet Bane, and, er, yeah, I change that part up quite a bit :p Let me know what you think! This fic is for fennho - hope you like it, girl! :) Let the angst begin...**

The whole cat thing - it was entirely an invention of the media. She didn't wear her goggles on top of her head to resemble cat ears, and she did not have cats in mind when she flitted across rooftops and jumped from windows, always landing on her feet. Nothing against cats - she'd even owned a few in her lifetime - but she would rather be known as something other than "a cat-like woman", or even worse, what her latest victim had called her tonight as she ran away with a small fortune's worth of jewelry - "Catwoman".

But, now that she thought about it, maybe they had a point.

She was halfway home now, clutching a small bag that contained enough fine jewelry to finance her escape from Gotham and at least half a year's worth of living expenses, and she was starting to notice how feline her movements actually were. It was not a conscious decision to move the way she did - it was simply how she always had.

Unlike some others in Gotham, she had no desire to dress up like her favorite animal and parade all over town scaring the daylights of people.

She jumped another rooftop, and pushed away the wayward thought of Batman before it clouded her head even more.

But, as if the thought had somehow summoned him like the Bat-signal that used to shine in the skies before the masked vigilante supposedly became a killer, there he was. Blocking her way to the next rooftop, dark and menacing in the moonlight, the picture of danger and everything else that he represented.

Her pulse began pounding like it did during the most enjoyable of her heists. Her gut also twisted with dread.

"I didn't expect to see you tonight," Selina said, clutching the bag of jewelry tighter, leaving plenty of space between her and the dark figure. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"You shot somebody tonight," he said, voice as raspy and gravelly as ever. The sound sent a chill down her spine.

"I've shot a lot of people in my life," she replied. "Would you like a list of their names?"

"You were more reckless than usual," he continued. "And you stole enough to live off for a year, two if you're careful."

"A girl like me needs to have a backup plan, wouldn't you agree?"

He stared at her. She didn't flinch under his dark eyes, but inside, she was quickly becoming a mess.

She _had_ been expecting him. She knew that he knew it as well. He was going to ask her to take him to Bane, and she was going to oblige. She was also going to betray him.

Her only other choice was to be killed, which meant that she had no choice.

She was an expert at the art of self-preservation, cold and calculating, flawlessly able to turn off her humanity and emotions if need be. So why did it feel like she was trying to flip a switch that was jammed, stuck in the "on" position, refusing to turn off the way she needed it to?

"I need you to take me to Bane."

Her reply came out before she could stop them. "You can't beat him. You'll be dead within the hour."

"What difference does that make to you?"

Underneath her mask, her eyes narrowed. That seemed to be an usually cold thing for Batman to say, and his tone was equally odd. Maybe he already knew what she was going to do.

"I stole these jewels tonight because I know what's coming," she said, "and I don't want to stick around to see it. You shouldn't either."

"So you help lay the groundwork for what Bane has planned for Gotham, and then leave the city to suffer while you hide in safety," he said, taking a step forward. Her pulse quickened even more, but she held her ground.

"I know what I am," she retorted. "You don't need to remind me."

"I think I do."

He was closer now, circling her like a predator. The night air was cool but it did nothing to soothe her suddenly burning skin. He spoke again. "You're a criminal, but you aren't a monster. I know what monsters look like. I know what they sound like. I know when you look into their eyes, you see nothing but a shell where their humanity used to be. You're nowhere near that, Miss Kyle."

He stopped circling her and stood only inches away. His eyes were burning into hers with an intensity that almost made her forget where she was. "You're a survivor. But one day, just surviving won't be enough."

He sounded like he spoke from experience. "It'll be better than dying for a city that turned against me eight years ago."

"You'll be tortured by your conscious."

"Who says I have one? For someone I've only met once before, you're making a lot of assumptions about me." She took a bold step forward. They were breathing the same air as she purred, "Or have I met you more times than I think?"

"Would it matter?"

"No," she admitted. Then she moved forward a fraction of an inch and kissed him.

But it _did_ matter. Everything suddenly mattered, and yet she was sure that she'd gone insane, because why in the world would she kiss a man that she was about to condemn to a terrible fate?

He was hesitant at first to respond, and she couldn't blame him. He shouldn't respond. But when her lips left his, his armored arms suddenly snaked around her and he yanked her back against him, claiming her lips as one hand rose to crush the ends of her hair in his fist.

Now her pulse was so wild and irregular that it was pointless to pay any attention to it, sort of like all of the reasons why this shouldn't be happening. She knew them all and surely he did too, although judging by the way he'd spoken to her about how she wasn't a monster, she now knew that he did not suspect her upcoming betrayal. Somehow, the deed seemed easier to do if he knew it was coming, because then, it was hardly a real betrayal. It was his own choice, in some convoluted way.

But now he was touching her, kissing her, shaking her to her core somehow with just the touch of his lips against hers. He wasn't gentle but he wasn't rough either, and when his tongue slipped into her mouth and tasted her greedily, her mind went astoundingly blank of any thoughts about anything except this very moment in time.

Her hands came up on his chest and it felt like caressing a stone. His lips, however, were impossibly soft, and she never knew how long it took for them to break away for oxygen. All she knew was that when they did, she only wanted him closer.

Behind them was a small enclosed stairway that led into the building of the rooftop they were standing on, and it provided just enough shadow to hide the both of them. She took a step back towards it, and this was her invitation to him.

He watched her for a moment, unaware of how his lips were smeared with red from her lipstick, undoubtedly torn between following his head or his body. She wondered as she took one more step back if either he or the man underneath the mask had a woman waiting somewhere, someone who shared his bed and his secrets. Maybe he did, and maybe that was why he hesitated. Or maybe he hesitated because this was, after all, insane.

She stepped under the shadow, and disappeared from sight, dropping her bag of jewels at her feet. He would either leave her hanging, or he would be under the same shadow in a few seconds.

She was wrong on both counts. He was under the shadow and kissing her in less than one second.

She found herself shoved against the wall beside the door and had to struggle to breathe as his mouth left hers and found her neck, one of his fingers hooking around the circular zipper of her suit at the collar and pulling down only a few inches to make access to her neck easier. But Selina found this a little silly, and pulled the zipper down almost to her navel.

When his lips stilled and his eyes fell upon the line of flesh now exposed to them, she pulled his face to hers. "Can we do this without masks?"

He shook his head. She sighed. "Then at least get rid of the armor. You feel like a statue."

She couldn't see exactly what he did, but his right hand did something and there was a small _whoosh_ sound. Seconds later, his arms and legs were still covered, and his mask obviously wasn't going anywhere, but now when he suddenly picked her up by her hips and pressed them together, it was skin that she felt against her own.

His hands pulled her zipper down further and pushed aside the surprisingly (to him) lightweight fabric of her bodysuit, freeing her breasts from their snug resting place and watching as light pink nipples hardened before his eyes. His gloved hand gave one a slow squeeze as he kissed her again, and she tightened her legs around his waist as she ground into the hardness between his hips.

A hiss escaped his throat and his grip on her hips tightened, and she reached a hand down between them and grabbed him through what he found out was a pair of boxer-briefs - now she knew what Gotham's Dark Knight wore under his armor, she couldn't help but observe - and she rubbed him until he tore his lips away from hers and slammed her harder against the wall with a growl.

Seconds later, he'd maneuvered the remaining fabric between them not fully off of them but enough so that he could position himself at her entrance, and when he thrusted inside of her without warning, she yelped.

Her hands clutched his shoulders and they panted nose to nose, and he gave her a moment to adjust to him before he moved again. But she didn't need the moment, and she rolled her hips against him impatiently.

He didn't hold back after that, and he took her hard but skillfully, bringing his lips down on every surface of her that he could as they followed a frantic rhythm, hidden in the shadows and hidden from each other in ways that were both obvious and not.

She didn't know his name, and he didn't know that she was going to double cross him within the hour. Neither understood the magnetism between them, nor what any of this meant, but the multitude of questions were far from their minds at that time.

Selina was surprised by the things his movements within her were doing, because she knew full well how hard it was for such efforts alone to bring her to the edge. But he was hitting her most sensitive place over and over, leaving her hardly no opportunity to breathe between waves of pleasure and the attacks of his mouth upon hers, and all she could do was move with him and try to hold it together.

It was when his face was buried in between her neck and shoulder and he was almost gasping into her skin that his thrusts became the most frenzied and finally pushed her off the edge. Her nails dug into his shoulders and she let her mouth fall open as she clenched around him so tightly that he groaned and found his own release at the same moment, as if it had been orchestrated from the beginning like some kind of scene from a novel.

It wasn't a far off characterization, Selina thought as he clung to her, breath coming in ragged spurts against her neck as they both came down from their highs. She couldn't remember the last time she'd had actual good sex, let alone sex like this. But, with the ending of their rooftop escapade came reality, and with reality came the unavoidable guilt that she had a feeling she'd be experiencing a lot of for the near future.

Eventually he set her back down on her stiletto-booted feet, and when he raised his eyes to hers, she was surprised to see her own guilt mirrored in his eyes. She was puzzled for a moment, but then she thought back to something she'd wondered about when he first hesitated to join her in the shadows.

Her instinct told her there was someone else. Probably not anyone too serious, because she couldn't imagine the incorruptible Batman two-timing an unsuspecting girlfriend, but maybe someone significant enough to give him pause.

She doubted she'd ever know for sure.

She fixed her bodysuit and zipped it back up as he reassembled his armor, both silent, both confused, but he was not nearly as vexed as she was now with the knowledge of what was to come.

They didn't say a word to each other when they jumped off the rooftop, nor afterwards when she led him into the sewers. The closer they got, the more she knew she'd regret it for the rest of her life if she went through with what she'd been planning all along.

But when the moment came, as much as her heart and her mind screamed at her not to do it, lifelong self-preserving instinct took over, and the cage door descended and locked with them on opposite sides.

She'd never forget the way he looked at her when he realized what she'd done.

After watching Bane break the man she'd betrayed, then reveal his identity by punching him in the head until his mask shattered, Selina could not take one more moment, and with a tear that she couldn't stop from falling, she finally turned and ran. She didn't stop running until she was out of the sewers and back on the streets of Gotham, but fresh air didn't have the effect she'd hoped it would, and she stumbled into the first alley she saw and vomited on the broken pavement.

Afterwards, she slid down to the ground and let herself cry.

Whether he survived or not, and she didn't expect him to, she would never, ever forgive herself. Even if he forgave her, she wouldn't.

"_You're a criminal, but you aren't a monster_."

_Try telling me that now_, Selina thought bitterly.

Meanwhile, back on the rooftop, her bag of jewels lay forgotten and abandoned, much like Bruce Wayne.

Tomorrow, she'd turn off her emotions and do her best to forget this night ever happened. Tomorrow, she would make plans to start over somewhere else, anywhere else, and she would do what she had to do to survive. Tomorrow, she would do her best to never think about Bruce Wayne or Batman ever again, or of what had happened between them. But for tonight, she allowed herself to feel every last ounce of self-loathing and shame that was threatening to drown her under a sea of misery, and she knew that no matter what lies she tried to feed herself in the future, she would never be the same after tonight.

Tonight, she felt like the monster he'd insisted she wasn't.


End file.
